having fun exploring fresh new sounds in composition land inspired by susanne and company knocking my brains about but  meanwhile:
 HAPPY INTERNATIONAL DANCE DAY ! time to bust a move !

 From Wednesday...

on Wednesday April 18th  we had our 2nd ensemble rehearsal...Susanne's  choreography and improv strategies gave a renewed focus to the parts and  big energy to the band's improvising ,just a wee taste of what is shaping up to be a joyous and exhilarating joining of forces . looking forward to our next ensemble dates and rehearsing the new material.
Susanne's nuanced approach to the music, learning all the "counts" and her amazing ability to compliment and contrast with cutting edge phrases in the dance lifts our playing of the music to new levels !
triple quadruple wowed ! yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeha !

Week 3 (in hindsight)

The energy and excitement of beginning (and it's accompanying sleepless nights) that I experienced in the first 2 weeks has evolved into a quieter, introspection  (and early morning risings) as we entered the world of Threnody 2 this past week. This piece does feel like a world, an aftermath, in contrast to the high energy, density and speed of Threnody 1. Threnody 2 is one of my favourite songs of Geordie's, it's the one that inspired me to want to create dance to Geordie's music, so I hold it with a different kind of attention and attachment than the other 2 pieces. Funny enough I spent the first two weeks creating material for Threnody 2 but at the last minute, in the rehearsal with the musicians, I switched it all to Threnody 1. Thank goodness most of the material also worked with Threnody 1. (I think at this point I better start abbreviating to T1 & T2). So this past week we pushed forward to T2 which, as I said,  has a very different feel than T1. T1 has an intensity, a falling through space, fight or flight feeling. With T2 the sense of unravelling that I was exploring in the earlier weeks has surfaced, along with the animals....deer, elephants, lions, squirrels and birds. (While teaching my young students this week I asked if anyone has a 'sprit animal'  - and they all looked at me as if I had two  heads. Little do they know, I have more than 2 heads!). Where T1 seems to be about holding on, T2 is more about letting go... or at least loosening. Choreography has become improvisation. Direction has become collaboration. Ideas have become instinct. Trust is our new best friend. Another fun (and scary) place to be.

What's better than dance & music?

I agree with Geo - I wish we could do this more often.
A snippet from our first date with the musicians:

In this video: Dancers: Jacinte Armstrong, Rhonda Baker & Sara Coffin. Musicians: Doug Cameron, Tim Crofts, Jamie Gatti & Geordie Haley (and me watching from the chairs!).

Thanks to all our collaborators for their amazing work so far. 

Monday at 10 am April 9th , the band loads in for our first rehearsal with the dancers and all i can think of is why can't this be an everyday event ?  the "groupo" or artist compound is a method of survival for many of my fave "world music " artists .....
Susanne's choreography is hard to describe in words ,which i guess is what modern dance is to me, the language that informs us, narrates for us , exposes  paths  to and from any point on any map be it internal or external.... could you say i am excited ! YEAHHHHH! the rehearsal went really well and we were all getting used to the idea of collaborating : in tempo ! in and out of synch !
cannot wait for the next rehearsal !
Thanks to Tim Crofts ,keys,Doug Cameron, drums and Jamie Gatti bass !

choose something shapeless....find ways..... to give it form
choose something fragile.....strengthen it
choose something hard.....soften it

the forming of bone, the forming of experience

(source: widening field, pg . 198)

Well... after some work (and some sleepless nights) the deconstruction/re-working/cutting and pasting brought us to a new order for one of the pieces. We are ready to bring in the band - phew! I forgot how consuming choreographing can be - a friend described it as like being in a new relationship. For me it feels like that and also like trying to solve a mystery,  like being Tom Hanks in the Divinci Code! The ensemble meets tomorrow for the first time. It's going to be great to hear the music live as we have been, up to this point, working with  recordings that were done in my living room.


I've been sick this weekend but the upside is that I've had some time to do some internet research and I finally discovered the name of the sculptures that have be in my mind. In September I was in Ottawa with Mocean Dance and we took a trip to the National Art Gallery. I was inspired by a series of sculptures that I saw and I wanted to use the images as source material for this process but I couldn't remember who the artist was until now - Louise Bourgeois. A French-born, American artist who recently passed away. The sculptures I saw were from her Echo series. They are pieces of her own clothing that had come in contact with her body and contained memories of people, places and relationships. She stretched, manipulated then cast the pieces of clothing in bronze and then painted them white. With regards the the connection of clothing and memory, Bourgeois wrote: “Time – time lived, time forgotten, time shared. What does time inflict — dust and disintegration? My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you.” 


Many crossovers to what I'm exploring... Here's a video of Jacinte improvising with my sweater during the first week of rehearsal:

Here's a link to some photos of Louise Bourgeois' sculptures:
http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2008-09-09_louise-bourgeois/

Construction - Deconstruction

The past few days we've spent constructing a big section of choreography, but I started getting this gut feeling that it's not quite right. I've been choreographing mostly without the music, trying to give the movement  some autonomy from the music, but I see now that I can't go any further without consideration towards how the two are ultimately going to relate. The music has it's own rhythm and phrasing and so does the movement - when should the two align and when is contrast the better choice? How much 'visual music' (i.e dance) is too much against the complexity of the music? Many questions are floating around in my head. So... I've created a plan (the chicken scratches in the photo below) and tomorrow I'm going to deconstruct (or possibly reconstruct) what we have so far. It's scary to destroy what we've built, but who knows what's on the other side. 

Week 2

Today we played with unravelling. My Graham training was awakened as this translated often into spirals for me. 


I'm inspired over and over again by this text from the a short story, Clarence, by Johanna Skibsrud from her recent book, This Will be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (pgs. 91-92): 

A beginning to...unravel somehow, break away. Until, finally, all the small and disconnected pieces that had somehow, inside of you, mysteriously, and for so long, conjoined, began to slowly disentangle themselves from one another, be sent---spinning---away...

super natural twists and lifts totally inspired by susanne and dancers ,what phrases and skill,yeeha !

Dark Harmony

On Friday we had a visit from Geordie. He scribbled down some notes as we reviewed the week's material and worked on some of the sections. On Easter Monday the rest of the band will join us for the first time. After the first week of play - getting out the raw ideas, getting used to working together - I look forward to digging deeper and seeing where that brings us...